Mission District

The Mission District is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. The area was named after the Mission San Francisco de Asis, the sixth Spanish Alta California mission. In the decades after the Gold Rush, the district consisted of housing plots for working-class German, Irish, and Italian immigrants, and industrial buildings. After the 1906 earthquake, many displaced businesses and residents moved into the area, and a large number of Mexican immigrants moved into the area from the 1940s to the 1960s. This initiated a white flight, and the Mission District became a predominantly Hispanic area. During the 1960s and 1970s, the western part of the Mission came to be inhabited by middle-class young people, and Valencia Strete became a major lesbian neighborhood from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Mission District was also home to a thriving punk rock community. In the 1980s and 1990s, the district received a high influx of immigrants from Central America, South America, the Middle East, the Philippines, and the former Yugoslavia. The area was gentrified from the late 1990s and through the 2010s due to the dot-com boom and the influx of yuppies, raising housing prices and rent. This caused the Latino population to drop by 20% by 2011. In 2008, the Mission had a population of 47,234 people.